I remember how it was -- JR
COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Mandates in Universities — Risk Benefit Analysis Leads to Net Harm
A prominent group of physicians, epidemiologists and bioethicists based at the most prestigious academic medical centers and universities have gone on the record that after a systematic analysis combining risk-benefit assessments as well as ethical factors the mandating of COVID-19 booster jabs at university campuses will equate to an expected net harm.
When forecasting serious adverse events as measured in cases of myopericarditis typically involving hospitalized young males as compared to the number of boosts required per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented. The net takeaway of this study: university mandates for COVID-19 boosters in the age of Omicron (milder version of the virus) cannot be orchestrated without a gross violation of ethical, moral and medical principles.
The authors of this study have expressed mounting concern during the pandemic, minority critics in large, prestigious university systems that the current mRNA vaccines are not all that the medical establishment and media cracked them up to be.
While by last August most all university mandates for COVID-19 boosters were all but gone, by August 2023, over 60 universities still mandated the COVID-19 jab.
The authors of this analysis clearly seek to not repeat the same policies in the future.
The present authors’ latest position in this essay published in Journal of Medical Ethics (BMJ) isn’t new. TrialSite reported back in September 2022, in “Bombshell Analysis: Risk-Benefit Analysis of mRNA Vaccines for You People Doesn’t Support Mandates” that the authors were essentially concluding the same recommendation—cease the COVID-19 vaccine mandates on university campuses.
Kevin Bardosh, Ph.D., from University of Washington (and University of Edinburgh), an applied medical anthropologist and implementations scientist, Vinay Prasad, M.D., MPH University of California, San Francisco, professor epidemiology and statistics, Mary Makary, M.D., MPH, professor of surgery Johns Hopkins University, Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, Ph.D. physics-investigator at Acumen LLC as well as corresponding author, and bioethicist Euzebiusz Jamrozik, Ph.D. University of Oxford Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities and others go on the record again, even more forcefully declaring based on their analysis at this juncture in history more young men (age 40 and under) mandated to get the mRNA-based COVID-19 jabs face the risk of hospitalization due to myocarditis than will benefit by the vaccines as measured by per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented.
While different academic researchers conclude with different data points, and the biases associated with this group could be argued are similar to the biases linked to groups arguing for mandates (they merely use differing assumptions, interpret some studies over others, etc.), it’s the latter that increasingly deviates from all commonsensical practice.
According to the present authors, however, to prevent one COVID-19 hospitalization over a 6-month period the critical collaborative estimates 31,207 -42,836young adults (age 19-29) must receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Yet that means that according to these authors’ math, 18.5 serious adverse events from the mRNA vaccines result, derived from 1.5 – 4.6 booster 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalization).
They anticipated that 1430-4626 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity interfering with daily activities (although typically not requiring hospitalization).
COVID-19 Mandates in Universities—Unethical
Why? The authors delineate the following elements:
Mandates are legacy from the pandemic, they are not based on an updated (Omicron era) stratified risk-benefit assessment for this age group
Based on the accumulation of medical evidence this result in a net harm to healthy young adults
Such policies are not proportionate: expected harms are not outweighed by public health benefits given modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission
The policy of mandates in universities violate the reciprocity principle because serious vaccine-related harms are not reliably compensated due to gaps in vaccine injury schemes
The mandates may result in wider social harms
But what about counterarguments?
The present authors delve int countervailing view—such as benefits like improved campus safety, “but find these are fraught with limitations and little scientific support.” For example, the vaccines’ durability levels mean breakthrough infections are commonplace.
The authors go on the record discussing how their analysis impacts COVID-19 primary series policy.
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The dangers of rugby football has led to some researchers calling for it to be banned from schools
With some researchers labelling the sport ‘a form of child abuse’ and parents questioning safety, can rugby get the balance right?
This story begins with a boy lying dazed and confused on a rugby pitch in Sussex last month. There are concussion symptoms that linger, days off school, and a stark revelation from a rugby-loving parent who provides first aid to the team. “It is not until you have cradled the head of someone else’s son, who is then unable to stand unassisted, that it really hits home how dangerous this game can be.”
Those dangers have now led to some researchers to call for rugby in schools and clubs to be banned for under-18s as it is “a form of child abuse”. Their argument, published in the Times on Friday, is that the risk of brain injuries from high-impact sports – including rugby and boxing – runs counter to child abuse laws. And neither children, nor their parents, can give informed consent as they cannot be fully aware of the long-term risks.
Once again rugby finds itself walking a tightrope: pushing the sport’s physical and mental health qualities, while facing pointed questions about safety.
Does it always get the balance right? That is what some of those parents in Sussex are now asking, especially after a second player left the same match with a suspected concussion. Was this awful luck? Absolutely. But on the touchline, others flagged another concern.
When rugby union in England returned after Covid, the Rugby Football Union extended the chance to combine age grades – in this case to under-14s playing in under-13s fixtures – to “sustain teams with lower player numbers who would otherwise not continue to play rugby”. In this match their opponents had several boys from the next age grade up.
The RFU’s decision was understandable. Player numbers in grassroots rugby have dropped. Clubs were struggling to re-establish teams. As the RFU says, the sport has huge benefits, including boosting “confidence, self-esteem, self-discipline and character”. It sounds like something from a 1920s boarding school prospectus, but it is also true.
The downside, of course, is that 12-year-old boys, many of whom have yet to hit puberty, are facing 14-year-olds, whose bodies are swimming in testosterone and other androgens which makes them taller, stronger, heavier and faster – and more dangerous. As one sports scientist told me: “We know that risk factors for injury are speed, power, strength, bulk and momentum in the tackle, so there is a fairly strong basis to say that widening the age bracket could increase risk. That doesn’t mean you don’t do it. But you have to monitor the risk and try to understand it not just quantitatively but qualitatively.”
Such a data-driven approach wasn’t in place when the RFU took its decision over combining age groups in 2020. Until this season, youth club rugby was not included in the RFU’s injury surveillance programmes, which focused on adults and some schools.
That, thankfully, is shifting. However, there is still no accurate picture of what happens when the under-13s and under-14s play together. Have injury rates gone up? Without a baseline we don’t know. When I put this to the RFU, it said there was “a robust assessment and approval process in place in our regulations to ensure a balance between player safety and retention”. Those rules include ensuring not more than half the players are from the older age grade. It also stresses that coaches must prioritise player safety and enjoyment, and work together to reduce mismatches.
But is that really enough to address parental concerns? Most 14-year-olds won’t be thinking about anything but running through defenders, regardless of whether they are younger. One idea would be to embrace the work of Dr Sean Cumming, who has argued for bio-banding in junior sport, where players are matched by maturation not their actual age. Other unions, including New Zealand, band players by weight.
None of that, of course, will make the safety issue entirely go away. Only last week, I was sent an open letter from Ceri Shaw whose husband, Chris, died last year. Chris was a keen rugby player for more than 30 years and after he died, Ceri donated his brain to Prof Willie Stewart at the University of Glasgow, who found signs of CTE – a degenerative brain condition linked to head injuries.
Given that rugby players with longer careers are more likely to develop the condition, Ceri asks why contact rugby is introduced at under-nine level in England and not, say, at 16. “During his life Chris was passionate about all aspects of rugby: the game’s ethos, the inclusive community and the conduct of fans globally,” she writes. “I would still like both my boys to play and enjoy rugby. There is research still to be done, but why risk the brain health of our children while we are waiting?”
Those in rugby tell me that teaching safe tackling technique at nine is safer than at 15 or 16, when kids will be much faster and more powerful. They also point out that World Rugby’s recent Otago study found under-13 rugby to be less dangerous than higher age groups and the adult game. But tell that to the parents of those poor boys in Sussex who sustained suspected concussions.
Even so, I still recoil at the idea of banning rugby for under-18s. The benefits of the sport still outweigh the potential costs, especially given the obesity and inactivity epidemic, which carries a different set of health risks. Ban rugby and where do we stop? Yet with every passing year, what we know about the dangers of head impacts continues to evolve. I strongly suspect rugby will have to as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/feb/05/rugby-under-18-children-research-concussion
***************************************************New anti-woke universities ‘the only way to cancel cancel culture’, says Niall Ferguson
Setting up new and better universities is the only way to reform a sector riddled with entrenched, extremist left-wing ideology, and is even more important in the wake of the academic world’s response to the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, says historian Niall Ferguson.
Aa senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Professor Ferguson was in Austin this week to welcome the first cohort of students to enrol at the University of Austin, where he is a founding trustee along with US journalist Bari Weiss. The two have helped launch a private university in the Texan capital that will be permanently free of campus cancel culture and dedicated to free speech and academic rigour.
“There came a moment (in 2021) when people were just being cancelled left and right at universities, and we decided we’ve got to do this,” Professor Ferguson said.
The march of anti-Semitism at US universities and around the world, including in Australia, made Professor Ferguson more determined to make the University of Austin, which has already attracted $US200m ($307m) in donations and about 20 full-time faculties, a success.
“After the events of October 7th, the strange responses we saw on campus, we no longer have to explain why we are building the university,” he said.
The October 7 attacks and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war triggered an explosion of anti-Semitic protests on and off campus that shook Americans’ faith in its elite institutions.
Two Ivy League university presidents – Harvard’s Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania’s Elizabeth Magill – resigned last year in the wake of a national outcry over their defence of anti-Semitic protests on campuses on “free speech” grounds.
In Australia, 64 per cent of Jewish students said they had experienced anti-Semitism at university after October 7 – a greater than 20 per cent jump compared with the preceding year according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
While he would not comment directly on Australian universities, Professor Ferguson said the fall of the Ivy League presidents and some academic backlash to anti-Semitism did not mean the old institutions would markedly change course any time soon.
“I don’t think the fact that two of those presidents have since left their positions means the end of wokeness,” he said.
“It’s not in retreat but rather very well entrenched. Declaring victory because Claudine Gay has stepped down (is naive); there will not be any real change in institutions, such as Harvard, which is not an outlier, until not just the president but the whole bureaucracy of diversity, equity and inclusion has been dismantled.”
Future students and their parents joined Professor Ferguson and other public intellectuals, including Michael Shellenberger and Harvard professor Roland Fryer, for a weekend of lectures and events. “The great thing about Austin is it’s cool, it’s a great place to build a university … We have a huge cluster of tech companies here, the economy is booming,” Professor Ferguson said.
Elon Musk was considering setting up a STEM- based university in the city, too, according to reports that circulated late last year in the US.
The University of Austin’s constitution, drafted largely by Professor Ferguson, explicitly enshrines free speech and includes disciplinary mechanisms for staff who contravene the free speech principles. “Universities have been perverted from their true purpose, which is not politics but scholarship,” he said.
“We have a constitution that will make that impossible.”
Professor Ferguson said cultural change at traditional elite universities, which he said had consciously chosen to transform themselves into hotbeds of radical politics under the moniker of “diversity, equity and inclusion”, would be almost impossible for a generation. “All those people have been appointed with tenure,” he said. “What are you going to do? Fire them all? It’s impossible.”
British universities, he said, weren’t as political as those in the US. “The reason that they’re not as bad in the UK, at Oxford and Cambridge, isn’t that there are not people there with same motives,” he said.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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